Here is how to create a universe fit for both Stephen Hawking and his readers: first, you need laws of physics that embrace gravity, quantum electrodynamics, special and general relativity and a few other things that are very simple to describe but very difficult to comprehend.

Then you need M-theory, which involves unimaginably small bits of something-or-other curled up into tiny near-nothingnesses with 11 space-time dimensions. M-theory permits universes to create themselves from nothing, on a non-stop basis, each with physical laws with different values. The number of universes permitted by M-theory is at least 10500, which is 10 multiplied by itself 500 times. To give you an idea of how big this number really is, the estimated number of particles in this universe – the one in which you read this review – is about 1080, and 10bn such universes would contain only about 1090 atoms.

You can read this review because in this universe, quite by chance, the physical constants were set at precisely the values that permit matter to condense from energy and hydrogen-burning stars to form, evolve, explode and shower carbon everywhere, creating conditions from which intelligent life can emerge, after 13.7bn years.

In this very brief history of modern cosmological physics, the laws of quantum and relativistic physics represent things to be wondered at but widely accepted: just like biblical miracles. M-theory invokes something different: a prime mover, a begetter, a creative force that is everywhere and nowhere. This force cannot be identified by instruments or examined by comprehensible mathematical prediction, and yet it contains all possibilities. It incorporates omnipresence, omniscience and omnipotence, and it's a big mystery. Remind you of Anybody?

It is not surprising that books about cosmic physics use the G-word. Almost invariably, their authors cite creation myths and astronomical traditions. Hawking and Mlodinow start with Norse stories about the wolves that periodically devour the sun and the moon; but they also invoke the Hsia dynasty legend of the archer and the 10 suns and the god Bumba of the Boshongo people of central Africa, before citing the Bronze Age biblical story of creation. The purpose of these invocations is to show how old are the questions addressed, and in the course of doing so, the two authors present as lucid and as compelling an account of modern cosmological physics as you could realise in so few pages. It is not until the penultimate page that they say: "It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going."

This sentence provoked a lot of chatter, most of it implying that Hawking might, at some stage in his career as a physicist, have believed that God could have been a contender. This is not the case. In the first place, even though Hawking invoked the name of God a number of times in 1988 in A Brief History of Time, he clearly never believed in a supernatural explanation. In the second place, science works by concentrating on natural explanations. Anything else would be cheating.

And in the third place, although you cannot prove a negative – that God does not exist – you can deliver partially testable theories of creation that might explain the existence of time, space, matter and energy without His help. And even those physicists who do believe in God and serve as lay-preachers do their best without supernatural feedback. It's what science is good at. It is why people can talk with such confidence about the history of the universe, shortly after the very beginning.

So we are left with a handsomely produced, wittily illustrated cosmology book which is of course slightly more up to date than a dozen other, equally readable cosmology books that have appeared in the past decade, all of which confess increasing uncertainty about the things that happened or might have happened in the first trillionth of a second of creation, and most of which address the possibility of a multiverse, of which this universe is distinguished not just by physical constants tuned for life's existence but also by physicists, publishers and publicists.

The remaining entertainment rests in trying to work out which of two considerable writing talents, one from Cambridge and one from Caltech, composed the individual sentences or paragraphs with which this story is so seamlessly told. So cosmic microwave background radiation, at 3 degrees above absolute zero, might not be "very useful for popping corn", and quantum probabilities mean that an electron used in a double slit experiment could in theory reappear on the far side of Alpha Centauri "or in the shepherd's pie at your office cafeteria". But which of them wanted to echo Hawking's famous original promise about knowing "the mind of God" with the sentence "We will have found the grand design"? And does it take us any further?

This article was amended on 13 October 2010 to restore the superscript to the second paragraph.